Alessandro Nivola Quotes

As far as my notoriety or whatever, I haven't been the star of a hit film.

It's not your responsibility to have the bigger picture in mind. But, the downside is that then, a lot of times, you're disappointed by the movies that are made around you.

Yeah, I’ve played a lot of instruments, and I played in a lot of bands growing up and I’ve even had to play music in a lot of films that I’ve done.

It's great to play a rock star. Maybe not so great to be one.

There's something different about an indie film than a TV show that has a huge infrastructure that's in place already for you - at least financially and in terms of distribution. Whereas an indie film is just a total dare.

There are so many things that have to go right for a movie to be good that it's a miracle whenever one is.

I've often gone to start a film only to find the producers surprised to discover that I'm American.

Producing is the antidote to acting. Producing is practical problem solving all day long. As opposed to endless self-obsession and navel gazing.

Well, I've never been in a touring rock band, it was all just high school and college, playing toga parties in frat houses.

Géza Röhrig is just incredible because he's not an actor, he's a Hungarian poet. He also happens to be a brilliant actor. He's totally unusual, the way he talks and thinks and operates isn't in the same language as you're used to from actors who've been in a lot of things before. It brings this completely bizarre and fresh, wonderful way of approaching everything that I love being around. Not where I'm, as a producer, having to interact with him as an artist, but as somebody who can stand back and admire what he's bringing to this thing that I've nurtured to create a stage for him.

The thing with being able to do accents is that it's still completely separate from being an actor.

I guess Ive always wanted to push the boundaries as an actor.

I see myself as a character actor, and I've always been drawn to playing characters that are different from myself because acting is escapism for me. I've never been that comfortable playing people that are like me.

Music helps define the character and is an extension of the character somehow, so that you are able to use both the songs themselves and the way that you sing them to tell something about the character and his story, as well as develop a performance style.

It's very hard to write music for a film because you're writing about somebody else's experience.

Acting can be very selfish and all-consuming.

I started off as an actor thinking that I would be this Romeo, this dashing leading man. It turns out that I'm a character actor.

For a long time a lot of people thought I'm British, because I'd done so many roles with English accents. People probably still think it. Or they don't think anything.

There are so many factors that go into how you feel, as a performer, on any given movie, that it's really hard to identify which things are the things that help you be good, and which are the things that hinder you.

You're making these movies for pennies, there's absolutely nothing to offer anybody, and they will still fight you! "There's no more back-end for him? Well he'll have your back-end! He'll take your first born child!" Producing is totally exhausting.

Anybody who is in freelance work, especially artistically, knows that it comes with all the insecurity and the ups and downs. It's a really frightening life .

With the movies, you do your preparation on your own. It's much more internalized and ... the actual performance is a kind of, just trying to capture one moment at a time, for the first time.

People are always going to identify with what it's like living in society and have people judge you in certain ways, and how you can be strong enough to be your own person and all those good things.

I'd grown up loving English films, I was a huge Monty Python fanatic as a kid.

Barry Levinson is such a deceptive director, because he seems really lackadaisical. I'd never worked with him before, and I almost got the impression that he didn't really care that much because he was so laid-back. Sometimes we'd finish filming hours before the day was over, which is just unthinkable in any other film experience I've had. I couldn't believe that Barry had the passion for it.

I love costumes. I love getting dressed up because it really helps my imagination make the leap to believe that I am who I say I am.

I'm a restless person. I get bored very quickly, particularly with myself. I've used acting as an escape and a way to channel my nervous energy. So I've always looked to find a role that's as different from the one before it. I need change and variety or start to feel depressed.

I don't separate Robert DeNiro's comedy from the serious stuff. The one thing I realize working with him in all of his work, is that he doesn't do anything unless something happens to him in scenes - unless something happens to make him react. He never came in with a set idea of how he was going to do it, he never came in with guns blazing. He would just show up and wait to see what happened.

I've never felt that I've had some great fashion sense of my own - I tend to wear what my wife tells me to wear.

I live right under the Hollywood sign, so that every day when I drive home I'm reminded of why I'm here.

You have to be in movies that make money to be offered work. Basically that's the equation. There's no real way around that. That said, you don't ever make decisions solely for that reason.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they’re trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that’s beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they’ve spent years just hanging out with adults and they don’t even have a sense of what it’s like to grow up with kids their own age.

Just getting to the point where we are now with 'To Dust' movie - where we've raised the money, put the crew together, signed all the actors up and are going on a certain date - is one of the biggest achievements of my life. It's nice, and producing definitely helps me to use the other side of my brain. I get brain fatigue from all of the creative drive.

When you speak in another accent, it affects you. You can't help but be changed by it.

The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.